While We Were On Our Knees
by corrupted-innocent
Summary: Jessica Moore has a secret. -- AU, no spoilers, one-shot, Sam/Jess.


May 5, 2008- i keep having spn one-shot ideas. i think i've given up on the idea of every finishing anything longer than two chapters. grr…

Rating: PG-13 for smoochies and a little bit of blood, but really, it's tame. (why do i keep writing these things? where did all my maturity go?)

Summary: Jessica Moore has a secret.

Disclaimer: all characters and settings belong to the CW; i get no money from this, only joy.

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Jess is gulping for air, standing over the body of the rakshasa, covered in its blood and gore. She's trembling, and she can't bear to look at Sam- sweet, innocent, shy Sam who is so good to her and so _normal_ that she knows he'll never forgive her for this- but she hears his laugh. It's a laugh that says _desp__e__ration_ and _disbelief_ and Jess fears that Sam is two seconds away from crying or screaming, so she turns around, the broadsword sticky with drying blood in her hand. She never wanted him to find out that the monsters in the closet were real.

She knows what this looks like. The rakshasa is half in its human form- a female one, which she'd never heard of before- but the wicked claws it had been using to kill its victims are visible, and they'd taken a shallow slice out of her back, so at least it doesn't look like she's just murdered someone. Still Jess can't bear to look in Sam's eyes, even when he stutters her name and steps toward her.

"Jess," Sam says, and she registers the awe in his voice. "Jess, you just killed a manushya-rakshasi. A _rakshasi_," he says again, and _there is no way Sam can know that._ She looks up, looks into his impressed face, decides he paid too much attention in all those Lore and Fable classes he'd taken, and laughs shakily.

"Sure looks like it, huh?" Jess says, her voice unsteady. "Someone really needs to learn to trim their nails. Will- will you call the cops?" she asks, thinking desparately about how to get the body away while Sam is there, so she can salt and burn it- and God, where will she take it? She hasn't had a body to contend with since she moved to Stanford, doesn't have a place set up to do the burn. And Sam will want to coddle her, the way she looks-

"What?" Sam asks, surprised. "Jess, we need to get the body out of here, burn it before it can manifest somewhere else. Come on," he says, tugging the sword from her grip. He pulls a bandana from his back pocket and begins to clean the purple-black blood off of the blade.

"You-" Jess stutters. "You _know?_"

Sam looks up, and he's suddenly grinning, that wonderful wide grin she first fell in love with. He drops the sword- gently- and cups her face, blood and all, and kisses her, first sweetly and then hotly, his tongue licking at her mouth. "Yeah," he mumbles. "Didn't know that _you_ did, though," he says, a chuckle in his throat.

"This is so crazy," Jess tells him, and kisses him back.

"I know," Sam agrees, grinning again as he retrieves her sword. "Do you have a place to burn it? Cause there's a nice old shanty about half an hour from here that I've been using..." And Jess just laughs and laughs.

SBSBSBSB

After the rakshasi- Jess hadn't known there was a separate term for the females, but Sam is _good_ at research- they spend some weekends drinking and some weekends hunting. Their friends start teasing them about how much time they spend together, how often they go out on dates, but Jess just smiles at Sam and he smiles back and reaches for her hand, and nothing in her life has ever been this good.

Before their junior year, Sam asks if she wants to get an apartment with him, and he's so shy and hesitant that she laughs before she kisses him and tells him yes. She knows he's religious, in a way- he prays every day, and blesses his own holy water instead of scooping it from the font at the church before mass like Jess does- but living in sin apparently doesn't bother him- and he's definitely not abstinent. Still, he's picky about the apartment-hunting, and not in the way that she is. Jess looks at the size of the rooms and the number of windows, asks whether or not they can paint the walls, install their own bookshelves. Sam touches doorframes, stands in the middle of rooms with his eyes closed, and asks who lived there before them. Looking back, she's glad he did, when they end up coming back for an exorcism to an apartment that Jess had liked but that Sam had said no to, adamantly.

Finally they find an apartment- it takes them most of the year- and they both agree that it's perfect; but it needs a few additions. They cut grooves into the window sills and door jambs, all the way around, and fill them with salt, covered with tape to run flush with the wood. They score protective runes on the walls, put bags of sage and rosemary in the drywall in the corners of every room, and Jess shows Sam how to draw a Devil's Trap, which he then sketches on the ceiling above every door, and Jess goes after him with the consecrated knife and the stool and carefully carves them in. And then they add a few drops of holy water to the paint and cover all of it up, and Sam moves with his rosary from room to room and blesses the whole apartment.

Then they invite over all their friends, have a housewarming party, and get so smashed that they sleep all the way through the day after and wake up together sometime after sunset. The apartment is quiet and safe, and it's theirs.

SBSBSBSB

A few months after they get the apartment, Jess finds herself asking their landlord about the pet policy. There'd been a series of strange dog maulings in Foster City, not too far from Palo Alto, but it wasn't a werewolf or anything else that they could figure out. When they get there, another hunter is just pulling a wicked-looking knife out of the body of a Yeenaaldlooshii, a Navajo skin-walker. Sam helps carry the body while Jess tracks down its den, trying to figure out if it had a mate. Instead, she finds two little balls of fuzz, whining and wagging shaggy tails. At first they look like little black Westies, but when she crouches carefully to investigate further, suddenly they're both huge- a Newfoundland and a St. Bernard. Still solid black, still pups barely weaned, and Jess just can't get her mind around it- a Grim and a skin-walker? Ugh.

But the puppies are adorable, and they can smell anything supernatural from miles away. They're also incredibly intelligent, and when Sam gets back, having thanked the other hunter and seen him off, he looks at the pups jumping at his knees in their little Doberman bodies and Jess can tell he can't bear to meet her eyes, let alone look at the broadsword she's clutching tightly.

They name them Yena and Looshi.

SBSBSBSB

"Anything you have to say, you can say in front of her," Sam says firmly, wrapping an arm around Jess's waist. She glances at Sam out of the corner of her eyes, but then quickly returns her gaze to his brother. (Sam's _brother_, who he never talked about, only mentioned when he talked about hunts he'd been on. She never thought she'd see the guy in her life.)

"Okay," Dean says, gamely, and she can see where Sam got his exasperated, _why me?_ expression from. "Dad went hunting, and he hasn't been home in a while."

Jess feels Sam freeze, and this time she looks at him directly, wondering what he's thinking. "What was he hunting?" Jess finally asks, when she realizes that Sam isn't going to say anything back to that. "Where was it last?"

"_Sam_," Dean says, in that _get the civilian out of the room_ tone that she's used before, heard her mom and her dad and her older siblings use too many times to count.

"It's okay," Jess says, looking away from Sam for a moment to meet Dean's eyes significantly. "I know."

For a moment, it looks like Dean doesn't know how to react to that. Then his eyes go soft and sad, like he's hurting for his brother, and he says Sam's name again, but this time it's full of sympathy and understanding and regret. Jess realizes that he thinks his brother told her about his childhood, that she hadn't been brought up to it already. She doesn't know why that makes him so sad, so full of... _longing_, but she doesn't correct him.

"Jess is right," Sam says, drawing her attention back to him. He looks like he's back in the real world now, anyway, but she can see how shaken up he is. "What were you hunting?"

"We split up," Dean says, shrugging uncomfortably, "a while ago. I know he was in Jericho, just a few hours from here, but I don't know what the hunt was. I was in Lockeford- it's by Yosemite, we've been staying in the same state as much as possible- vengeful spirit, easy business," and Dean kind of rushes through the last bit, like it pains him to talk about it in front of someone he doesn't know he can trust, "and I couldn't get a hold of him when I checked in. I've been cruising around waiting to hear from him, looking for a hunt, but it's been over a week. And..."

"And if something took Dad out of the game, it's not something you should face alone," Sam says for him, when he hesitates. Sam nods, then looks at Jess. "It's Friday- you want to bring the boys and come along, or stay here?"

"What?" Dean snaps out, surprised. "Sam, are you crazy?"

"I can handle myself," Jess says calmly. "If you don't believe me, ask Sam." Dean looks at Sam enquiringly.

"It's true, Dean," Sam tells him, shrugging bashfully. "She's been hunting almost as long as I have."

"The only reason I let him investigate your break-in is because the dogs don't listen to him and we didn't want them to rip a robber's throat out," Jess points out with a little smirk.

"Looshi! Yena! Come!" Sam says sharply, glaring half-heartedly at her as the dogs come scrambling from the bedroom, as if to say, _See, they listen to me._ Jess just rolls her eyes and gestures for the dogs to sit- which they do, Yena an inky-black Dalmation with his right ear missing, Looshi shoving his Great Dane head under her palm for scratches. Both of them are watching Dean.

"Looshi, Yena, this is Sam's brother Dean," Jess introduces. "Dean, meet Yena and Looshi." She sees Dean mouthing their names, can tell that the connection is just on the tip of his tongue, and then an eyeblink later Yena is a Setter, and Dean yelps.

"They're skin-walkers?! Are you both out of your minds?" He's backing towards the door, reacing a hand to the small of his back where he probably has a gun tucked into his jeans, but the dogs are doing their wheezy laugh at him, changing forms lickety-split from one thing to another until they both look like Chihuahuas, jumping up and down and yipping outrageously.

"Dean's kind of stupid sometimes," Sam says apologetically to the dogs, and they look at him with lolling tongues and then roll their eyes, which Jess has secretly been teaching them to do for _weeks_. Sam eyes her like he knows what she's been up to, but she fawns over them all the same.

After that, they get into the meat of the argument, which is basically whether or not Jess has a right to come on a hunt, especially a hunt involving their missing father. Dean loses that fight spectacularly.

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this is coming out of a rush of spring cleaning and getting a bunch of stuff uploaded to ffn that has been sitting around on lj or my hard drive. hope you enjoy! comments are love, and concrit is always welcome.


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